Shop Update 14 June

Mermaid Sighting!

Well no, not really, but after a really slow spring we’ve got a shop update for you, and it’s a great one.

Liz (the queen of sparkle) has been playing with seashells this time.  She’s put together some absolutely brilliant pieces for you. Including a few dangles.  Yes!  We’re finally offering components for you to play with in the comfort of your own home.

I know, it’s just a few colors.  If what you want isn’t shown, ask!

We’ve also got mermaid earrings

Finally, we have mermaid necklaces  (these are incredible)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Between you and me, I’m thinking these might be priced a bit low. So get ’em quick before I change my mind!

Hope your summer is full of beauty, magic and mermaids!

Fan Vids

Vidding is an artform: the fan labor practice in media fandom of creating music videos from the footage of one or more visual media sources, thereby exploring the source itself in a new way. The creator may explore a single character, support a particular romantic pairing between characters, criticize or celebrate the original text, or point out an aspect of the TV show or film that they find under-appreciated which is commonly uploaded to a variety of social media outlets – Wikipedia definition.

Fan vidding, according to Wikipedia, was invented in 1975 when Kandy Fong synced Star Trek stills on a slide projector with music from a cassette player. Later in the 80s, began the type of vids I was eventually introduced to that were made with two or more VCRs synced with music in a painstaking copy/record process. I didn’t come across them until I went to my first fan convention in the late 90s. I have four vhs tapes of Sentinel fan vids and two more of vids from shows like Highlander, Buffy and Hercules.

I would like to share some of my favorites across various fandoms which I feel are great examples of several styles of viding.

Starships by bironic (multi) is a fabulous example of picking a theme and running with it with brilliant editing to the music and lyrics (slightly NSFW lyrics).

This Is War by DuskyPhoenix (Avengers) is a great example of matching the lyrics and characters.

We Are Not Sheep by wolfpup2000 (Supernatural) is a tribute to the relationship of the characters. (Show level violence and gore)

They’re Coming To Take Me Away by wolfpup2000 (Supernatural) is comedy using clips from the blooper reels to make the song work. There is a related family of vids called Crack vids which are usually funny clips or bits with captions all edited one after the other.

Animals by naqi_ (Hannibal) is an example of emphasizing a particular ship, in this case the relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham by choosing moments and matching to the lyrics especially since the ship was practically canon in the show. (Show level violence and gore).

Survivor by Little Mat (multi) is what I would call an anthem vid plus I love multi vids to see how many fandoms, tv and movies I recognize. Again with the brilliant editing.

Other vids I recommend just because they are fabulous:

Problem by Talitha78 (Captain America) is a vid using footage almost exclusively from Captain America The Winter Soldier which shows how to make use of limited source material and still promote a ship.

Glitter & Gold by Grable424 and djcprod (Marvel) which I loved for the editing and the most comprehensive use of characters for when it was made using footage through Doctor Strange.

Parachute by twwings (Leverage) which does a great job showing one of the big ships of the show- OT3 that was not canon

S&M by yotb0ka and kc2oo9 (multi) just a lot of really attractive men…

Tonight I’m F***ing You by Talitha78 (White Collar) Language – shipping Peter and Neal which promotes the ship and the vid makes me chuckle, I think it’s the song.

Centuries by Agent of OakenSHIELD (Star Wars) beautiful – uses footage up through The Force Awakens and Rogue One

Bunny Fur!

This post provides a quick overview of drop spinning, with links to various Etsy vendors.  I am not affiliated with any of these shops, but I do recommend them as a customer.

I am, if I say so myself, a darn good knitter.  I’m a competent crocheter.  There are a handful of other crafts I do fairly well.  There are a million of other crafts I resist getting in to.  Just ask Jill, show me a new craft and my reaction will be to go ‘oooh’, then make signs to ward away temptation and evil, and chant repeatedly ‘I do not need a new craft…  I do not need a new craft…  I do not need a new craft’.

It’s true, that every new one gets that ‘ooh, shiny!’ response, but I know that I don’t have the time, money, or mental cycles to invest in something completely new.

Spinning is something I’ve been teaching myself on and off for three or four years now.  It’s mesmerizing, in the same way that working on the pottery wheel is – the device goes round and round until it stands still and the whole world revolves around it.  It’s meditative to the point of being enchanting.

Which is a way to say that spinning, though not a new craft, exactly, is one that I’m not very good at, but still willing to invest time, money, and mental cycles in.

Which is why when Kim (Clayfetish on Etsy)  came to craft night with a bag of down from her late lamented rabbit Tifi I offered to try my hand at turning it into yarn.

So I started with a few grams of fluff.  It was clean, but had small amounts of vegetable matter in it.  Not being an expert at fiber prep I read up a bit, and decided that a little hand fluffing was really all it needed.  (No, that’s not as dirty as it sounds.)

I chose to work with a tiny spindle I bought from Alphyn Trading.  It’s a beautiful piece,  a top down made from a section of agate geode and sandalwood.  Unfortunately it’s the first spindle I bought, and it’s been dropped a few times, so has lost the original gasket keeping the whorl in place, and so it has a short, uneven spins.   Still, I love it, and I knew it was what I wanted to use for this project.

I ended up with a fine single. Here you can see it somewhat before it was finished.  Note the cop (the part that’s spun and wound on the shaft) forms a conical shape.  It looks nice in the picture, but I have to confess that that little bit of yarn hides a multitude of sins – breaks, thin spots, weak spots, and bits of vegetable matter which I just couldn’t get out.  Beginners yarn is funky!

I knew I wanted to do an Andean ply (that’s a method of 2-ply with a single, wrapping it so that you work from ends to the middle).  I wasn’t sure that I could ply it in one sitting, so I picked up a tool I’ve been wanting for a while.  A 3D printed plyer from Turtlemade.

I wrapped the full length of the single around the plyer.  When I was done, I removed the peg and had two ends free.  I just plied those together using a slightly heaver spindle – a SciFi Turkish from Snyder Spindles.

Turkish spindles are fascinating to me, in part because of how neatly the cop winds on.  (I think it’s still called a cop when it’s plied yarn, but I couldn’t find confirmation online – please comment if you can confirm or deny).  Here’s the same lovely cop (or copp) from the bottom.

One of the nice things about a Turkish spindle (fun fact – AFAICT there’s absolutely no reason to think that this style of spindle has anything to do with Turkey the country or turkey, the bird) is that it creates a center pull ball.  You might think that the yarn is finished, but it’s not, really.  It’s not enough to ball the plied yarn, you have to set the twist as well.  At some point I might test that, but I didn’t want to do it with this particular spin.  So I continued with the process.

I wound the yarn onto a niddy noddy.  This one is a sample sized Ashford Traveler from The Spinnery.  Each revolution is a yard, and so I was able to measure 39 yards, but the real purpose is to wind it into an open shape.  39 revolutions of loop, tied in several places.  I then soaked it in a lot of luke warm water with a little wool wash for about fifteen minutes.  Then I wrapped it in a towel and squeezed out as much water as I could, and beat it on that same towel to felt it just a bit.  I let it air dry on a hanger (a second hanger at the bottom of the loop) before twisting it up into a skein.

There it is.  Bunny Love for all of you.

 

Can You Love a Show and Dislike the Main Character?

I’m not very active in fandom.  I read like an industrial vacuum cleaner and leave kudos and compliments but in regards to joining debates and episode discussions, etc. in major public forums, I give it a miss.  That means I only hear about fan wars and crap like third hand on tumblr and previously on Live Journal.  With that history, I can only rely on spotty memories of old rants and old authors’ notes.

Having said that, there are three main characters that come to mind, two that I have encountered instances of and one that is a personal opinion; these are Buffy Summers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Duncan MacLeod of Highlander the Series and Scott McCall of Teen Wolf (the series).  I think all these characters suffer from excessive amounts of “righteousness”.  They are the main heroes, the supreme good guys who always have to win and even though they have all the big tragedies their moral compasses are always perfectly right. Until they’re not, but even then we’re supposed to forgive everything as a learning experience. And for a huge amount of people – this is what they want to see in the hero.

However, in all these shows, the second tier characters have huge followings.  In Buffy, it was her best friend Willow Rosenburg, who came into her strength, witch powers and bisexuality over the course of the show.  In Highlander, it was Methos/Adam Pierson, oldest Immortal who was full of snark, practicality and PTSD and who tried to show Duncan other ways to see the world.  And in Teen Wolf, it’s the best friend Stiles Stilinski, super smart and curious, with ADHD who is “165 pounds of pale skin and fragile bone; sarcasm is my only defense.”

For instance, I came across one Highlander writer who could NOT stand Duncan.  All her stories were written with Methos as the main character – fine, but the nastiness in the author’s notes (not the story summary but added text sometimes giving the prompt idea or whatnot) and the treatment of Duncan in the story was offputting.  She was so unpleasant about it that I found myself wondering why she bothered to watch the show in the first place.  Also Methos as a character was usually only in about one third of the eps in seasons after he was introduced.  What the heck was she doing for the rest of her viewing experiences?  I have come across the same type of people who only watch Supernatural for the Destiel and if there’s no Castiel in the episode – it’s not worth watching.

My personal main character dislike is Scott from Teen Wolf.  He’s all sunshine and goodness with some terrible blind spots.  Mainly that he won’t kill.  The bad guys are either offed by other people or “fixed.”  Does that ever work out well?  Do some of these bad guys deserve to be saved?  Maybe I’m too bloodthirsty but I say no.  Also – fictional.  My other problem with Scott is that he’s a bad friend.  He gets turned into a werewolf and disregards the helpful info provided by Stiles, tries to claw Stiles several times because he’s not in control (and not really trying) and practically dumps him as soon as Scott gets a girlfriend, then in a later season Scott accuses Stiles of killing someone and dismisses him and ending the friendship by taking the word of a seriously shady guy and without ever hearing out Stiles for his side. They always make up by the end of the crazy- but I don’t feel Scott deserves it.  I realized my dislike of Scott by the end of season one.  Why keep watching you ask?  Well – I liked more about the show than just him.  And I like the Bad Friend trope in my fanfiction, it promotes the pairing that I prefer.

Now I am really familiar with the concept of hating a character (usually a bad guy) and getting to like them later either by appreciating the bad or the character changes to be good or at least grey instead of dark – Supernatural is fabulous at this. And you try to give characters the benefit of the doubt for being buttheads – usually kids/teenagers.  I’ve ditched shows that could have been interesting because every single person was shitty (though the writers would likely say “edgy”). Whether they were too goody-two-shoes, a righteous dick, ridiculously naïve or annoying/stubborn that was supposed to be charmingly innocent; have you ever disliked a main character that you were supposed to love?

PS – I just remembered Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City.  Damn, I wanted to rip her head off.

Shop Update 3/7/19 – More Dragons

Now we have one in blue!

 

Liz seems to be enjoying these.  No more tales of Amy, this time around, but I understand she is doing well.

These things come in waves…

I think another ‘baby season’ is coming up.

Now that the girls are both graduated from college, and we’ve gone through the first wave of ‘our friends are now getting married off one after the other’, the next step is the baby wave*.  Abby has asked me to knit a shower gift for her boyfriend’s sister, who is expecting a baby in May.

I’d forgotten how knitting for babies feels.  I chose a very simple pattern for this one, and it’s fast and easy and super cute.  It’s also pretty generic, because I don’t know this family and Abby wants to present a certain image, and super fandom isn’t it.

I’ve said for a while that I really ought to have a baby gift or two ready to go.   After this sweater is finished (and all the buttons secured in a baby safe manner) I’ll get on that, pick a nice blanket or sweater pattern and just work it up.  Again it will be something ‘safe’ and generic.

After that, who knows.  There are some adorable fandom baby patterns.  Have you seen the  dalek dresses.? How about a baby in shining armor?  All the things…..

* Please note that this is not my prescription for the way thing should go.  There are any number of other life paths which lead to really awesome things.  It’s more my observation on the way things tend to go, and are likely to go, in the social circles my daughters have developed.

Shop Update 2/20/19

Red Dragon Egg

The prototype for this glorious dragon egg was shades of purple and gold. After finishing it at one of our sessions, Liz took it home with her. She assured me that we can’t list it because it hatched! She says that young Amy is happy and healthy, and not for sale.

We can’t promise that this one will hatch, but it is a joy to behold.  Get your very own red dragon egg today!

Remembering Joe

In December, Jill’s husband Joe passed away suddenly and without warning.

Joe was an amazing man, he was caring and thoughtful and playful and funny.  At our Tuesday craft nights, Joe’s creativity was expressed through cooking and through song lists.  In our (sometimes) biweekly gaming sessions, Joe’s character was always the loose cannon.  He was always there to listen, to offer advice or distraction as needed.  He will be sorely missed.

It’s taken my a long time to posting this. I’ve been in shock for a while. We’re still here.  We’re still meeting most weeks, and the shop is still open (even though this blog as been neglected since last summer*) Jill is getting over the shock, but is now dealing with the extended aftermath, which is taxing both emotionally and administratively.

So please bear with us while we continue to get a grasp on ‘the new normal’. I’m currently thinking of making a few amigurumi cats with unicorn horns and rainbow tails, because Joe totally would have loved that.
 
 *That’s unrelated to health issues, I’ve just been having a hard time balancing regular shop updates and full time employment. I’m going to try to get better at that.

I Am A Collector

The first step is identifying the problem… Yeah – I‘m always going to be a collector and usually several collections at the same time. I want to clarify that my jewelry and media libraries are not being considered part of my general collection issues.

 

The first thing I remember collecting was stickers – very age appropriate. I had a 3-ring binder with at least 100 pages of stickers.  I wonder if Mom still has it in the attic.  My next vivid recollection was a combination of starting my personal library and getting My Little Ponys.

 

Do piles of crafting supplies count?  Once I started beadwork – I had to have all the colors. And here is a pic of some of my scrapbooking supplies – yes – that is all paper in the slightly leaning tower.  

At some point in high school I found one of my passions that still continues: pewter fantasy figures (also I collected keychains from vacations but I’ve quit that).

Mostly what I’ve settled with as my real passion for collecting is Dragons.  I’ve got the pewter, glass, wax, resin, ceramic ones, jewelry, a couple of t-shirts, one that I cross-stitched and a giant puzzle that is framed.  (Also see my dragon Christmas tree topper.) So I’m sharing a portion of my favorites with you. I have a preference for European dragons over the Asian dragons but there is love for all the glorious mythic lizards.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Nightmares, Literal and Literary

The other night I had a nightmare about The Fainting Game, which I heard on the Pseudopod podcast.  I woke up with images of dissolving flesh and bone, and a vague feeling of complex undercurrents between young people and how those interactions are reflections of even more complex interactions with their parents.  Worlds under worlds.

It was a very cool dream, really, and the story is incredibly cool itself.  (There’s lots of good stuff on Pseudopod, check it out if horror short stories are your thing).

This month I finally got around to reading The Portrait of Dorian Gray*. Like many people, I’ve known the premise of the story for a very long time, but had never read the actual story.  Last year I picked up a free Kindle book “The Wolf of Dorian Gray“, and decided I should probably get around to reading the Portrait before starting it.  That was a mistake.

Portrait

Like most classics, there’s a lot more to it than I was expecting.  Knowing what little I do about Wilde, I wasn’t surprised by the never quite explicit homoerotic romantic triangle, but I was surprised by the teen suicide.

It’s about a subtle seduction, not necessarily sexual.  From the vantage point of a 21st Century audience, it hardly matters whether there is a sexual element in it, it’s more of the deliberate manipulation of someone’s personality and desires which shocks.  In fact, the more obviously sexual of the suitors, Basil, seems to represent goodness (if not virtue), while the more cerebral of the two (Lord Henry) is most definitely a corrupting influence.

Of course, I had a good idea of how the supernatural horror would play out before picking up the book, but it was the corruption of Dorian’s nature which I found really disturbing.  I’m not at all sure that Lord Henry realized what he was doing, but…   very creepy stuff, in a subtle way.

Wolf

Having read ‘Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters‘ a few months after finishing the Craftlit rendition of Sense and Sensibilty  I thought I knew what to expect.  That mash up did a good job of taking the same characters and situations, adding in Lovecraftian horror, taking out a lot of the complexity but hitting all the same beats and keeping the framework the same.

In the Wolf there’s a ‘prelude’ which is put in for ‘drama’.  It’s completely unnecessary (your audience is primed to expect the ‘boring’ bits of the original story, at least a little bit), and, worse than that, it’s trite.

In the opening scenes it’s clear that two sides of the homoerotic triangle have been gender flipped.  It’s a choice, but it’s such a boring one.  I get it that modern books really should have strong female characters, but why not flip all three?

Then there’s the setting.  This book isn’t about a Victorian society which is prim on the surface and has a seething underbelly full of barely suppressed sexuality.  No, it’s all on the surface, with upper class ladies openly cavorting with whores.  In short, it’s a fantasy setting which is more suited for high adventure than Gothic horror.

OK.  I’ve talked myself out of throwing my Kindle at the wall.

Note to self: next time, wait a year or more before reading the mash up.

Note to self: read more classics.  There is usually a lot more to them than the elevator pitch.

 

* No link here. You all know about the book, and shouldn’t have any trouble tracking it down if this makes you want to get a round tuit.